Online store provider Limited Run has dubbed Facebook “scumbags”, claiming the social network is holding their company name to ransom, demanding $2,000 a month in advertising spend before allowing the company to update its details, following a change in name from Limited Pressing to Limited Run.

“While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name,” wrote a representative for the company on its Facebook page, “Because we’re not Limited Pressing any more. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name … But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month.

“That’s correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of shit out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They’re scumbags and we just don’t have the patience for scumbags.”

Perhaps even more controversially, the company claims: “While testing [Facebook’s] ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks.

“So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook.

“So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.”

The company is clear to stress that it is not accusing Facebook of improper behaviour and that it cannot prove where the bots originated, but that they were loading pages and driving up the company’s advertising costs unacceptably.